SHE was the head of the ReJoyce festival in 2004, but it was Laura Barnes herself who had cause to rejoice after selling a cache of James Joyce manuscripts to the Irish state for €1.2m.

The American academic, who bought the material from a Parisian book store about a year before reselling it to the National Library, refuses to say how much she made. But she insists that, despite her previous links to the library, where she has acted as a consultant, the deal was “kosher beyond kosher” and she did not have privileged information.

“If you mess around, you get caught,” she said. “I did it the right way.”

The National Library said it could have bought the papers direct from Paris, cutting out Barnes and saving money, but it preferred not to deal directly with a bookshop.

Information about a draft of Finnegans Wake, written on six large sheets of paper by Joyce in 1923, surfaced among collectors in early 2004. The National Library heard of it, but Barnes bought them for an undisclosed sum from Jean Claude Vrain, a Parisian bookshop owner.

Barnes says she did not know the library was interested. “Of course not,” she said. “I wasn’t the only person to see the documents. But I was the person who figured out they were good and undervalued, and I stepped up to the plate. My information was good, and that’s why I stay in the rare-book business.”

Because of her links to the library, she hired Sotheby’s to sell the Joyce documents. The auctioneers approached the library in December 2004. Barnes said other purchasers were considered: “There were multiple balls in the air. To suggest I knew the National Library would buy it is a pipe dream. Nobody could know that.”

The library was always a likely contender, however, as it had bought two previous collections of Joyce writings.

The library admits it could have purchased the draft directly from Vrain, but chose not to. “That would have been high risk, and you have to tread carefully,” said Aonghus O hAonghusa, its director. “We were reluctant to dive in. There were rumours that Sotheby’s had the sale, and we waited for them to approach us.

“Sotheby’s acted for the Leon family [in the 2002 purchase] and we had a good relationship. They know what we want in terms of ownership and provenance. It provides a level of reassurance that a small Parisian book dealer could never do.

“We may have paid over the odds, but we have the reassurance of knowing that everything is okay. The papers were professionally valued, and what the state paid is well within the range of the valuations.”

The library only found out that Barnes was the middle-woman after it completed the purchase, announced in March. The name on the tax certificate was Laura Rosenfeld, Barnes’s maiden name. To add to the confusion, she was best known to the public as Laura Weldon, co-ordinator of the 2004 Bloomsday celebrations.

Barnes explains there is nothing sinister in her use of different names. “Rosenfeld is my birth or legal name and Barnes is my first married name, which I used for 20 years. Weldon was my second married name, and after that marriage ended I went back to Barnes. That’s the name I use to pay my bills.

“Keeping your name out of the deal is standard procedure. I was not under contract [to the Irish government] when I bought the material; I was just a bookseller. Sotheby’s sold it to the National Library in an arm’s-length transaction, because I know people in there and they know me. No-one in the library knew the vendor was me until the sale was done.”

A graduate of New York university and Harvard Business School, Barnes, 40, was already a Joyce scholar and collector when she was hired in 2003 by the department of arts to organise the ReJoyce festival. She founded Araby Books, named after a story in Joyce’s Dubliners, and once told The Sunday Times that the book business involved “some splendid deals that provided me with attractive cheques for very little work”.

She now compares herself to property developers who buy a building, sell it on, and do well out of it. “If I was a property developer or a man, this would be a moot point. I can’t believe that anyone finds it interesting that a bookseller does her job.

“Yes, the numbers [on this deal] are big, but I’m still working, I haven’t retired.”

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